Software engineers have maintained a self-conception as highly paid, skilled tradespeople. This framework is falling apart now that the barriers to entry are disappearing. The craft is now carried out by AI — the SWE is just the capital allocator, deciding where there is ROI, liquidity risk, and room for diversification. The profession is completely different from just a few years ago. As all…
Last year, I quit my job to work on a project of my own. This was February of 2023. ChatGPT had come out in the fall of the previous year and I was thrilled by the possibilities of LLMs (I still am), but that’s not the whole story. The summer before, I revisited a pivotal influence of mine: Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu . In short, Nelson had the idea that hypertext (a term he coined) should be…
One of the coolest aspects of software development is the way it makes really big theoretical questions around system design totally accessible. Every teenager building a web app is deploying an ad hoc bureaucracy of computer processes. As you get more experience, you start to think critically about how it all fits together. I remember reading “The Rise of Worse is Better ” a decade ago. The first…
In the twentieth century space exploration reached its zenith during the Cold War. At this point, space exploration was revealed to be about two things above all. First, space was made the arena for a new sort of competition between nations. While America and Soviet Russia were engaged in a cold war, space exploration became the scale by which to measure the effectiveness of the two countries and,…